Last month, FDA withdrew a proposed rule for standardized asbestos testing in talc-based cosmetics. The proposed rule, introduced in Nov. 2024 and withdrawn Nov. 2025, was mandated by the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 or MoCRA.
Following an open comment period, FDA decided to withdraw the rule—citing significant public opposition and unintended consequences.
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“When you read the headline: ‘They’re withdrawing a proposed rule that would regulate asbestos,’ it’s hard to see how that could have maybe a less malicious… or not malicious, but insidious spin,” Jacquelyn said. “But like you said, it’s so, so complicated.”
Some experts and lobbyists suggested the withdrawal smacks of industry influence. Indeed, even if unintended—some industries will benefit from the rule reprieve.
“I think this [rule withdrawal] is enormously valuable for Johnson & Johnson, even if it lasts only for a few weeks. Because at the very least, it sort of muddies the record and helps them clawback credibility,” Gardiner Harris, author of The New York Times bestselling book “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson,” said to The Cancer Letter.
However, some other experts believe that the proposed rule was fundamentally flawed, and that a withdrawal was necessary in order to completely rewrite it, Claire said.
“But, nothing has really changed,” Claire said. “It was just a proposed rule, the rule was not finalized.”
An HHS spokesperson said to The Cancer Letter that a new, more “comprehensive” rule is forthcoming. Historically, it’s not unusual for FDA to withdraw a rule in order to rewrite it, and then propose it again.
“A lot of insiders—FDA watchers—I’ll call them, pointed out that FDA is legally required to issue this rule. They are mandated by the Cosmetics Act [MoCRA]. So I mean, that’s the good news, is that the administration has to propose another and hopefully better rule,” Claire said. “I guess the concerning news is that there’s no timeline for when that’s going to happen. So, in the meantime, it’s voluntary, and it’s up to us to decide what’s safe.”
Stories mentioned in this podcast include:
- John Byrd brings blood cancer expertise to solid tumor, immunology powerhouse at UPMC
- FDA withdraws proposed rule for asbestos testing in talc-based cosmetics. It’s anyone’s guess whether the agency is preparing to strengthen or relax talc regulation.
- ESMO publishes guidances on AI tools for clinicians, patients, and researchers. Says one author: “We think there should be some degree of human oversight, otherwise, they can go completely rogue and nobody notices.”
- Harvey Risch, critic of COVID-19 response, tapped by White House to serve as chair of the President’s Cancer Panel
This episode was transcribed using transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.
The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on The Cancer Letter Podcast:
Jacquelyn Cobb: This week on The Cancer Letter Podcast.
Claire Marie Porter: Another interesting point that I think surprised even the epidemiologists at this panel was how abundant talc is. So it’s like on chewing gum, that white powder that keep your chewing gum from sticking to the paper.
Jacquelyn Cobb: It’s so funny you told me that on Friday about the chewing gum. And I went to the grocery store and I was like… I literally looked at the gum. I was like, “Do I want this? I don’t know.”
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah. We’ve been chewing gum from this organic kind of co-op nearby for a long time. And I will say gum without talc, gum without plastic in it is not as fun. You can’t blow bubbles. It’s really a bummer, but having young kids, I was really… Well, I didn’t even know about the talc bit, but I knew about microplastics and stuff like that being in gum. So we’ve been eating the pure gum for a long time, but it is disappointing. Yeah. It’s nothing like what we grew up with.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know. What is it called, Hubba Bubba or whatever?
Claire Marie Porter: Juicy Fruit, I was thinking, or the zebra with the tattoo on it.
Paul Goldberg: You’re listening to the Cancer Letter Podcast. The Cancer Letter is a weekly independent magazine covering oncology since 1973. I’m your host, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And I’m your host, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter. We’ll be bringing you the latest stories, groundbreaking research and critical conversations shaping oncology.
Paul Goldberg: So let’s get going.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Hi, Claire. How’s it going?
Claire Marie Porter: Hey, Jacquelyn. Pretty good. Snow day.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yay.
Claire Marie Porter: How are you?
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yes. Yes. I heard you had a little bit of a crazy morning. Thank you for hopping on the podcast. It is a crazy podcast week, so a lot of talking.
Claire Marie Porter: Happy to be here. Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Awesome. Yeah. So I mean, we wanted to sort of take the in the headlines this week and talk about your story because the cover story with John Byrd, people can go listen to the full thing on YouTube already. So we wanted to sort of dive into a different story this week. And your story was super, super fascinating. I feel like on Friday we spent probably an hour editing it, but it was mostly just because I was enjoying it so much. It was just, I had so many questions. But before we get into that, so I got a little ahead of myself. I’ll walk us through last week’s headlines.
The cover story last week, which I’ve now already alluded to, was a conversation with The Cancer Letter featuring John C. Byrd, who was recently named director of the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and Associate Vice Chancellor of Cancer Affairs at University of Pittsburgh.
Paul and Byrd had a really great conversation about Byrd’s goals for UPMC. He’s a blood cancer giant and he’s coming to UPMC, which is really renowned for its immunology and solid tumor work. So it’s going to be a really cool mashup.
Claire, as we’ll talk about more, wrote a fascinating article about the storied history of the FDA in talc following the recent withdrawal of FDA’s proposed rule that would have mandated asbestos testing in talc-based cosmetics.
Finally, we had a story about ESMO’s recent guidelines on AI tools for clinicians, patients, and researchers. So it included chatbots and more behind the scenes work, biomarker development, but all AI driven. That story was really interesting because the guidelines really broke down all of these different uses of AI and oncology and addressed safety concerns and current best practices for each of them. So that was fascinating.
And we had a very rich cancer policy as always. So Harvey Risch, a critic of COVID-19 response or the COVID-19 response who was interviewed for the job of NCI director earlier this year, he was tapped by the White House to serve as chair of the President’s Cancer Panel.
And yeah, there’s more cancer policies, but we have a complex story to go through today. So I’m going to first just hand it off to you, Claire, to sort of give us the high level overview because you’re so familiar with it. And I’d also just really love to hear how this story came about, like the behind the headlines type thing where, because I know that this was sort of a multi-week project for you in some ways.
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to say upfront that, I mean, there’s probably questions that you have that I might not be able to answer because it is such a complex history and I still feel very much like a student of this topic and a baby FDA watcher, I guess, if you will. But I guess it came up because we saw that the proposed rule had been withdrawn and the immediate alarm, I guess, from NGOs and health campaigners was… Yeah, there was kind of an outcry. And so my initial response was, “Oh, this must be highly unusual. Why would they withdraw this rule? It must be political or something happened or industry influence or something.” And I think the story initially was maybe just going to be a cancer policy or kind of a smaller B story. But I think as we talked to sources and started reporting it, it turned out to be a lot more complex and there’s a lot of kind of shades of gray in the story and kind of the history of talc, why it was withdrawn, maybe it should have been withdrawn.
So it turned out to be a much longer, I think ended up being more like four to 6,000 words, type of story. And I think there was even more to say. Had it been a cover story, I think I would have tried to find… Kind of given more of like a comprehensive timeline and more of the history of the Cosmetics Act and all of that, but we kind of just jumped right into the proposed rule. What was it? What does it imply that it was withdrawn and why was it withdrawn? So that’s kind of the origin story. The proposed rule was just recently withdrawn last month. It was a rule for a proposed rule for standardized asbestos testing in talc-based cosmetics. It was mandated by the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 or MoCRA and FDA withdrew the rule citing significant public opposition and unintended consequences.
And so I guess they had proposed the rule and then Makary, FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, held a round table, an FDA expert panel or round table was what he was calling it in May of this year to talk about it, brought on a bunch of experts to talk about talc. And after that, there was an open comment period where people could submit comments based on that expert panel. But apparently after the proposed rule last year, there was also an open comment period. And taking together all of those responses to the proposed rule, FDA decided to withdraw it in order to, in their words, rewrite a more comprehensive rule, which is forthcoming apparently.
So that’s where we fell into the story was they had this proposed rule. I had covered the talc panel back in May, which was really interesting. There was a lot of stuff about talc that I didn’t know, food-based talc versus industrial grade talc, and how there really is no safe level of talc. It occurs naturally alongside asbestos in many cases. So asbestos contamination in cosmetics has a long and kind of sordid history. The EU is banning it in 2027, I believe, just completely banning it. And a lot of experts and epidemiologists believe that it should be banned here as well.
So I guess with the… I’ll just say one more thing and then I’ll let you ask questions. Going on and on here, but the last thing I’ll say is just that the important thing is that nothing has really changed. It was just a proposed rule. So the rule was not finalized. There has been no standardized testing for talc, that is very much voluntary. And cosmetics, we’ve known that cosmetics can contain contaminated talc for many, many years. So a lot of companies are very upfront about this. It’s had a lot of publicity. One of the Kardashian sisters was involved in kind of raising awareness about this. So it is possible to find companies that are really transparent about whether or not they use talc.
So I’ll kind of stop there. There’s kind of a really, really broad overview, but yeah, my brain is just kind of like…
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know. I honestly feel the same way. I think honestly, maybe not having so much context is actually helping me see it a little bit less overwhelmed, but it is, I think, just such a complicated and complex story. And when I was reading it for the first time, I think I… And maybe this echoes your experience a little bit too, where I remember a lot of quotes and sort of what you said about this sort of outrage. So many different quotes were saying that this withdrawal of this rule is dangerous and risky, and I forget the other words, but a lot of really, really-
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah, reckless.
Jacquelyn Cobb: … strong adjectives.
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Reckless, thank you. Exactly.
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah, yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: And I mean, when you read the headline, “They’re withdrawing a proposed rule that would regulate asbestos,” it’s hard to see how that could have maybe a less malicious… Or not malicious, but you know what I mean, like insidious spin. But like you said, it’s so, so complicated. And so I just want to sort of tease out, if you can, and I think, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but maybe sort of that other side that you got to later in the story about how… If you do trust that FDA is going to put out another rule, which a lot of our sources did have some maybe concern about whether that actually is forthcoming, but just hearing sort of maybe the other side of it briefly, and then I do have more questions, but…
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah, no, that’s fine. I can kind of get into it. It is really complicated when it comes to the methodology for testing for asbestos and talc. So the initial proposed rule, which was a Biden era rule in 2024 of last year, November 2024, it would have required manufacturers of talc containing cosmetics to test each batch of talc or the finished product for asbestos contamination using two different methods. The first was polarized light microscopy, and the second was transmission electron microscopy, which from my understanding are imaging techniques that allow you to look at the structure of a specimen under a microscope. And so the public comments were multifarious, and I think some of them were publicly available after the initial 2024 rule.
I know one of my sources, John Joseph Godleski of Brigham Women’s, told me that he was one of the initial responders to the rule, pointing out some of the flaws. He was really forthright with me. He was at the panel, actually, the expert panel, and he said straight up that there was some significant problems with the initial rule and that it actually would have ended up favoring the industry and that it really needed to be fully withdrawn in order to be scrutinized and rewritten. His main hangup with the rule was that it would have created the potential for false positives, and it had to do with missing kind of the nuances of asbestos, the nuances of the amount of fibers that could be found in talc-based cosmetics, like either zero to 100, I think is what he was saying. If it’s 100% asbestos contamination, that would have missed kind of everything in between, if that makes sense.
So it just wasn’t nuanced enough. It wasn’t comprehensive enough. So his belief was that this was actually a really fitting response to the open comment period and that he’s confident that a more comprehensive rule is forthcoming. A lot of insiders, FDA watchers, I’ll call them, pointed out that FDA is legally required to issue this rule. They are mandated by the Cosmetics Act. So I mean, I guess that’s the good news is that the administration has to propose another and hopefully better rule. And I guess the concerning news is that there’s no timeline for when that’s going to happen. So in the meantime, it’s voluntary and it’s up to us to kind of decide what’s safe.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Well, that was actually going to be my next question was… And again, you’re not able to give advice. We are just reporters, but as I was reading the story, I think one of my first questions was like, “Well, what do we do in the meantime when there’s no oversight?” I feel like it’s just a little scary to think about there’s… And like you said, I think it was… And again, I’m not deeply, deeply in the story, so I feel that I could be missing nuance even in these questions, but like you said, not much has actually changed because it was voluntary before.
Claire Marie Porter: Yes.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Correct?
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb: So just … Yeah.
Claire Marie Porter: Exactly. Yeah. No, nothing has actually changed. And I mean, the Environmental Working Group, which is one of the health organizations, nonprofits that kind of called this reckless, dangerous and really took issue with it, was pointed to some of their apps and databases that you can use to plug in your cosmetics and see if they are on a concerning list or something. But yeah, nothing has really changed. It was just a proposed rule that had not been finalized yet. I think it was more the optics for a lot of these organizations to withdraw a rule that felt like a lot of progress. The initial proposed rule was pushed for by a lot of lawmakers who have been working on this for a long time. So just to kind of withdraw it, there’s a legal notice in the federal register that answers some questions, but it’s vague.
And so I think it requires some… I guess I find myself in this place where we’ve been writing about Trump’s FDA and we’ve been watching the internal kind of turmoil at FDA. And so it’s hard to not, with all of this staff turnover and all of this upheaval to not question kind of every action and assume that there’s something maybe unseemly going on. But I think in this case, it really does feel like this is not an abnormal way to go about rewriting a rule or writing a rule that withdrawals happen. It’s part of the kind of protocol. And I didn’t dive too deep, but if you look back a little bit into just thinking of the history of FDA, this has happened before. It’s not unusual to withdraw a rule in order to rewrite it.
So yeah, I will point out, and I can’t really talk a ton about the industry side of things, but one of my sources did point out that this kind of reprieve will benefit the industry. There’s a long, again, sordid history of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder essentially, and 67,000 plus lawsuits, depending on who you talk to, still pending against that company. And any reprieve with this rule withdrawal will end up benefiting them and helping them kind of claw back credibility from the jury and the courts.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Like you said, we can’t really dive too much into that right now because we have not done the reporting, but it’s an important consideration, I think, just to mention. The last thing I want to ask you, Claire, and this is kind of going backward and I hope there’s more to say. If there’s not, we can go in another direction, but I would like to talk about cosmetics at FDA because we don’t ever… Or I’ve never looked at that really. It’s always been drugs and I guess biologics and devices to an extent, but cosmetics is something that I’ve never explored or looked into. So I’m wondering what you learned about that in doing this story and also just how it relates to the story specifically.
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I know a little bit about that based on my reporting. And so the big thing is that FDA’s legal authority over cosmetics is very different from their authority over other products such as drugs, biologics, and medical devices. So under the MoCRA law, cosmetics products and ingredients, they don’t need FDA pre-market approval with the exception, I believe, of color additives. But FDA can pursue enforcement action against products on the market that are not in compliance with the law or against firms or individuals who violate the law. But yeah, so currently in the US testing is voluntary and multiple sources said to me that the cosmetics branch or area just has very, very little power.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. That’s fascinating. I wonder… I’m feeling like a new special interest come about. I want to learn all about it, but I have to figure out a cancer angle so I can do it during work.
Claire Marie Porter: I think we had talked about this while we were editing my story on Friday, and I kind of have to look at my notes for it because it’s really complicated and I don’t want to use the wrong words, but something that kind of I think blew both of our minds was that cosmetics companies have known since the ’50s that asbestos can contaminate talc. Public was alerted in the 1970s. However, multiple investigations have shown that the industry persuaded FDA to kind of allow companies to rely on test methods that can detect some, but not all asbestos fibers. So yeah, at least since the ’70s, it sounds like FDA has downplayed health concerns around talc. And to their credit, Trump’s HHS, Makary especially came in to the agency, talc was one of the cornerstones of his MAHA agenda. And aside from it being directly linked to various cancers, a lot of the sources and experts at the panel said it has other implications as well that it can cause inflammatory diseases and it can cause things like Crohn’s and all kinds of kinds of issues.
And another interesting point that I think surprised even the epidemiologists at this panel was how abundant talc is. So it’s like on chewing gum, that white powder that keep your chewing gum from sticking to the paper. We know it’s in rice, but it’s on a lot of candies. So it’s kind of one of those things that it really deserves some serious scrutiny. So I’m glad we’re talking about it and I want to continue following this story because it’s really unfolding and it’s been going on for decades.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s so funny. You told me that on Friday about the chewing gum, and I went to the grocery store and I was like… I literally looked at the gum. I was like, “Do I want this? I don’t know.” So it is a thing. Yeah. So I’m glad that you’ll be watching it. I can rely on you to get the news.
Claire Marie Porter: We’ve been chewing gum from this organic kind of co-op nearby for a long time. And I will say, gum without talc, gum without plastic, and it is not as fun. You can’t blow a bubble. It’s really a bummer, but having young kids, I was really… Well, I didn’t even know about the talc bit, but I knew about microplastics and stuff like that being in gum. So we’ve been eating the PUR gum for a long time, but it is disappointing. Yeah. It’s nothing like what we grew up with.
Jacquelyn Cobb: I know, what is it called, Hubba Bubba?
Claire Marie Porter: Juicy Fruit, I was thinking, or the zebra with the tattoo on it.
Jacquelyn Cobb: The tattoos were my favorite.
Claire Marie Porter: Yeah, they were the best. Yeah. RIP.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Awesome. Well, what a nice note to end on after a maybe potentially not-so-fun conversation, but lovely. And thank you so much for joining me, Claire. I know it was sort of a crazy podcast week, but I appreciate you and I will see you soon.
Claire Marie Porter: Sounds good. All right. Bye.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Thank you for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast, where we explore the stories shaping the future of oncology. For more in depth reporting and analysis, visit us at cancerletter.com. With over 200 site license subscriptions, you may already have access through your workplace. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Together, we’ll keep the conversation going.
Paul Goldberg: Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and thank you for listening.
